Counterfeit Gentlemen

Counterfeit Gentlemen is a stunning reappraisal of Southern manhood and identity that uses humor and humorists to carry the reader into the very heart of antebellum culture.

What does it mean to be a man in the pre–Civil War South? And how can we answer the question from the perspective of the early twenty-first century? John Mayfield does so by revealing how early nineteenth-century Southern humorists addressed the anxieties felt by men seeking to chart a new path between the old honor culture and the new market culture. Lacking the constraints imposed by journalism or proper literature, these writers created fictional worlds where manhood and identity could be tested and explored.

Preoccupied alternately by moonlight and magnolias and racism and rape, we have continually presented ourselves with an Old South so mirthless it couldn't breathe. If all Mayfield did was remind us that Old Southerners laughed, he would have accomplished something. But he also offers a sophisticated analysis of the social functions humor performed and the social anxieties it reflected.

Title Page

Front Matter

Copyright

Dedication

Contents

Acknowledgments

This book might have started in many ways. It could have begun, for example,
in Mrs. Florence’s English class when I was in the sixth grade. She
assigned a book report but specifically outlawed anything from the Hardy
Boys or Nancy Drew series, so I went rummaging through my mother’s
Book-of-the-Month Club selections and came up with the shortest ...

Introduction: Negotiating Manhood in the Old South

This is a book about values and identity in the Old South. It uses ideas
about manhood to examine those values, and it uses humor to explore
manhood. It is not, strictly speaking, a book about the comic tradition
in the South, a subject that has been thoroughly and skillfully explored.1 ...

1. The Conception and Estimate of a Gentleman

BEFORE THERE WAS Sut Lovingood or Ransy Sniffle or Simon Suggs
or the Big Bear of Arkansas, there was the Virginia gentleman. All models
of Southern manhood and masculinity had their reference point, their
high ground, in this single figure, which went by several names: squire, the
quality, country republican, aristocrat, Washington, Lee. Even his more ...

2. Georgia Theatrics, Georgia Yankees

AT ABOUT THE SAME TIME Kennedy was finishing Swallow Barn, a
lawyer from Augusta, Georgia, decided (for no recorded reason) to write
down accounts of some of the stranger characters he had met riding circuit
as a judge. The stories first appeared in local newspapers, then in
1835 as a book, Georgia Scenes. The author, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet,
wrote them off as a “literary bagatelle,” a mild attempt at social history. ...

3. Counterfeit Presentments

IN 1833 JOHNSON JONES HOOPER informed his mother that he was tired
of working menial jobs “without any hope of going to college.”1 He left
Charleston to join an older brother in Alabama. Four years later, up in the
Shenandoah Valley, Joseph Glover Baldwin threw a few law books into
his saddlebags and headed off in the same direction. ...

4. Useful Alloys

THERE IS A MOMENT NEAR THE END OF Thomas Bangs Thorpe’s only
novel, The Master’s House, when the hero, Graham Mildmay, gathers up
his rifle and tries to slip away, as if going off on a hunt. His wife stops
him for an awkward moment, looking at the gun. “I could not have the ...

5. Swamp Fevers

Henry Clay Lewis, physician and humorist, once stole a baby—a “dead
nigger baby,” to use his exact terms. He did it because anatomy fascinated
him, and he wanted his own specimen “to while away the tedious hours
with” while he waited for dinner. He also stole it simply because it was ...

6. Notes from the Underground

THE SOUTHERN MAN OF HONOR may have been pitifully equipped for
dealing with the changing marketplace, but he was a powerful ally in
the coming war over who would control the expansion of slavery. The
gentleman’s paternalistic benevolence and his domestic values of family
and home-centered responsibility were far more effective apologies ...

Epilogue

WHEN WAR BROKER OUT, John Pendleton Kennedy was an elder statesman
with plenty of spare time in which to reflect and opinionate. In
the 1850s he had made a final attempt at obtaining national prominence,
serving as secretary of the navy under Fillmore, and then had largely
settled into his role as gentleman patron of Baltimore’s mixed Southern
and Northern elites. He dabbled in nativism, as did so many displaced ...

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